how Israel's military-industrial complex feeds the global arms trade
- Written by Kevin Foster, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University
In The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World[1], Antony Loewenstein details how Israel’s military-industrial complex has grown from a minor industry into a dominant economic and social force at home and abroad.
He traces how, since 1967, the Occupied Territories and their people have furnished Israel with a living laboratory for their application and development of border security and surveillance systems, phone-hacking spyware, tracking and targeting technologies, as well as more traditional weapons systems. Tried and tested in the field, these systems are then packaged and sold for export.
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the wave of anxiety they engendered, demand for Israeli hardware and know-how exploded. Israel is now one of the world’s top-ten weapons dealing nations[2]. Its defence enterprises market everything from small arms to killer drones, from spyware to surface-to-air missiles. If it flies, watches, listens or goes bang, Israeli companies make and will sell it to (just about) anybody.
The Israeli economy, one critic noted, has “abandoned oranges for hand grenades”. Perhaps. But, as Loewenstein notes, everybody wants hand grenades nowadays.
Review: The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World – Antony Loewenstein (Scribe)
A bomb hits the building housing international media, including The Associated Press, in Gaza City, May 15, 2021.
Mahmud Hams /Pool Photo via AP
Read more:
The Nakba: 75 years after losing their home, the Palestinians are still experiencing the 'catastrophe'[4]
Commercial sales
The commercial sale of technologies ordinarily reserved for state purposes, and their subsequent misuse, often by states themselves, has disturbed senior intelligence officials in the “five eyes” intelligence community[5] and strained ties with Tel Aviv.
The first major customer for NSO’s Pegasus spyware, in 2011, was the Mexican government, which at the time was locked in a bloody struggle against drug cartels. The capacity to listen in to the narco-traffickers’ conversations and read their text exchanges gave Mexican authorities a crucial if temporary edge. Pegasus, they later claimed, had played a key role in the 2016 arrest of the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, “El Chapo”.
However, it wasn’t long before state officials made the information garnered by Pegasus, and the technology itself, available to the cartels. While the drug traffickers targeted their rivals and their critics in the media, leading to a massive upsurge in the killing of reporters, the government used the technology to spy on critics of its other policies, notably proponents of a sugar tax on the country’s soft-drinks industry, giving the lie to its assurance that it would be used solely to track perpetrators of major crimes.
Jeremy Fleming, former director of Britain’s intelligence, security and cyber agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), described NSO’s practices as “beyond the pale” and argued that “countries or companies that promulgate [technology] in an unconstrained way like that are damaging and should not be tolerated”.
How are the Israelis able to behave like this? Why doesn’t the United States rein them in?
Loewenstein argues that after the US failed to protect it from Iraqi Scud missiles during the first Gulf War, Israel exercised greater autonomy in the production, deployment and trade in its military technology. It is not an entirely convincing argument. It overlooks the fact that the Scuds that landed on Tel Aviv and Haifa in January 1991 were targeted as much at the Arab and Muslim-majority members of the international coalition that the US had assembled against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as they were at the Israelis.
The missile attacks were intended to provoke a response from Israel, which was not a member of the US-led coalition, in the belief this would bring about the withdrawal of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and others, and so precipitate the collapse of the anti-Iraqi alliance.
Israel has acted with greater independence from the US because, over the past 20 years, it has become less economically dependent. Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel was perennially the largest recipient of US aid, which in 1981 was roughly equivalent to 10% of Israel’s economy. As its economy grew, the size and significance of the US subvention diminished. By 2020, the US’s $4 billion of financial assistance amounted to only 1% of the economy, thus freeing Israel to act, at home and abroad, with less regard for the political interests or moral sensitivities of the US.
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington DC, November 2015.
Andrew Harnik/AP
As the retreat from liberalism plays out across the world, in the US, India, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland and multiple African states, Netanyahu looks less like a has-been and more like a portent, the “rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem”.
In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein does not merely indict Israel for its failure to live up to the promise of its founding principles and its leading role in the supply, sustainment and normalisation of a border-industrial complex. He also condemns Europe, the US, Australia and the West for their politicisation of fear of the outsider, their receptiveness to divisive demagoguery, and their moral complicity in the immiseration of millions who live under occupation and oppression, and the millions more who roam the Earth in search of safe harbour. Israel may have lost its way, but once-civilised nations seem to be following it into the darkness.
References^ The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (scribepublications.com.au)^ top-ten weapons dealing nations (www.statista.com)^ US$11.3 billion (www.timesofisrael.com)^ The Nakba: 75 years after losing their home, the Palestinians are still experiencing the 'catastrophe' (theconversation.com)^ “five eyes” intelligence community (privacyinternational.org)^ On its 75th birthday, Israel still can't agree on what it means to be a Jewish state and a democracy (theconversation.com)^ €460 million in 2020 (www.euronews.com)^ €34.9 billion on border and migration management between 2021 and 2027 (ec.europa.eu)^ Peter Beinart (peterbeinart.substack.com)
